University of Maryland Students Launch Puzzle App

Ever want to send a picture to your friends and make them work to find out what the image is?

University of Maryland students Ghedalia Gold-Pastor and Zach Matz recently launched Puzzable.

“It’s a combination of Snapchat with Words with Friends,” said Gold-Pastor, a 2012 graduate from Bethesda-Chevy-Chase High School.

The two students wanted to create a new, unique way for people to interact socially.

“Obviously people love sending pictures to their friends,” Gold-Pastor said. “We thought a great way would be to turn it into a puzzle. It adds a new twist to the photo-sharing game.”

“Imagine if you sent your friend a picture, but he doesn’t know what it is immediately,” Gold-Pastor said. “It’s not immediate gratification.”

Puzzable operates on three different play modes:

• Play Now: The game offers stock photos for people to solve puzzles on their own. The vision is that photos for the play now mode will be from various charities and nonprofit organizations. Gold-Pastor said he and Matz want to help raise awareness for various causes.
• Messages: Take a picture and send it to your friend as a nine-piece jigsaw puzzle with a caption. Your friend will put together the pieces and see the picture. The picture won’t be visible until the puzzle is solved.
• Challenges: In this competitive mode, one person takes a picture, adds a caption and sends it as a jigsaw puzzle anywhere from 4 to 64 pieces. The person is timed to put the puzzle together and sends an image back after solving the puzzle. The first sender will then solve the puzzle sent by his/her friend then compare scores to see who puts the puzzle together the fastest. However many pieces the first image is sent in is the same number of pieces for the response puzzle.

“What’s great about puzzles is it builds cognitive abilities and skills,” Gold-Pastor said.

Puzzable also offers users a way to earn rewards through game play.

“You might solve a puzzle and win a subscription to a magazine,” Gold-Pastor said. “You might send a challenge and when you get enough points, you can redeem them for gift cards or donate your points to charity or enter a sweepstakes.”

The app is already available on all Android phones and tablets and will soon be available for iOS.

>>Image Screenshot from Google Play app store.